as for inspiring things written in bad english, I was editing an essay for a freshman basketball player who is from Cameroon. The essay was supposed to be about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. at the end, he wrote a statement that he attributed to his grandfather, a Tupuri chief in the North. it didn't make sense, so i asked him to translate it from Tupuri to French, then i put it in a more idiomatic English:


When you allow someone to talk,
his ideas are formed when he speaks,
and by ideas the universe is defined.

this is probably as good a formulation of the hypothesis as Sapir or Whorf would have made, and it is an old proverb from a clan of nomad warriors.